Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Monday, July 23, 2007

"...What Amis knows more than just a thing or two about is writing. He’s one of the most influential stylists in contemporary literature. But even more, he’s a stylist who can still rub words together that mean something—passages that can get at the nerves and run havoc on the brain..."V Magazine

"...On the band’s fourth album, the aptly-named Visitations, Clinic dives even deeper into its own murky musical cosmos. Cyclical, chugging rhythms drive the record, while vocalist Ade Blackburn intones in his cryptic, Thom York–ish croon over catchy, pagan-themed tunes that bring to mind ancient rites of celebration, witchcraft, and images of a dusky English countryside."V Magazine

Thursday, July 19, 2007

"But if the admirable part of political correctness is that one shouldn't utter unsupportable, reactionary ethnic, gender, or other generalizations, that principle is misapplied in the case of terrorists, who are picked out for condemnation by their acts alone. Aren't "bastards," "scum," and so on precisely the right terms for people who seek to maim and kill presumably innocent others to make a political point?..."The Chronicle Review

Friday, July 13, 2007

"A Friday occurring on the 13th day of any month is considered to be a day of bad luck in English, German, Polish and Portuguese-speaking cultures around the globe. Similar superstitions exist in some other traditions. In Greece or Spain, for example, Tuesday the 13th takes the same role. The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia, a word that is derived from the concatenation of the Greek words Παρασκευή, δεκατρείς, and φοβία, meaning Friday, thirteen, and phobia respectively; alternative spellings include paskevodekatriaphobia or paraskevidekatriaphobia, and is a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, a phobia (fear) of the number thirteen."Friday the 13th -Wikipedia.org

"It's eye candy of the highest order, yet there's nothing extravagant or competitive about the way Lacroix shows. These days, he simply stages his collection in the unpretentious Palais de Tokyo museum, preferring to load all of the resources that might go into sets and Champagne into finessing every last fabric, crystal, and bow to the nth degree. So be it. When Lacroix turns out a collection as accomplished as this, it's surely worth it."Christian Lacroix Couture Fall 2007 - Style

"If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?"Edge of Evolution Review - NY Times

Sunday, July 1, 2007

"Fashion was sexy. So was surrealism. They were a natural fit. Nobody ever called cubism sexy, or constructivism, or any of the other movements of the early 20th century except German expressionism, which did have its sexy moments - though not so very many of them. But one of the core beliefs of the surrealists, as set forth by their leader, Andre Breton, was in l'amour fou, obsessional love, the kind of love that deranges the senses and tips those who feel it into a helpless vortex of appetite and feeling..."L'amour Fou - The Guardian

"Along with "the new black", "the next big thing" is probably the most overused and inaccurate cliche spewed out in the fashion world. This has been particularly true in the British fashion industry, which, desperate to fill an Alexander McQueen-sized hole since he left to hold his shows in Paris almost a decade ago, has parroted the phrase any time a bright young thing with a bit of promise and a lot more confidence has appeared on the ever more depleted London Fashion Week schedule..."'The Artful Designer' The Guardian